Python in Education

The Story of Python  |  3

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The project planned to have three components. They intended to:

1. Develop a new computing curriculum suitable for high school

and college students.

2. Create better, easier-to-use tools for program development and

analysis.

3. Build a user community around all of the above, encouraging

feedback and self-help.

The results of the project’s endeavors were to come together in a sci‐

entific exploration of the role of programming in the next genera‐

tion of computing environments. The proposal continues:

We intend to start with Python, a language designed for rapid

development. We believe that Python makes a great first language

to learn: Unlike languages designed specifically for beginners,

Python is also the choice of many programming professionals. It

has an active, growing user community which has already

expressed much interest in this proposal, and we expect that this

will be a fertile first deployment ground for the teaching materials

and tools we propose to create. During the course of the research

we will evaluate Python and propose improvements or alternatives.

Exploring how learners used Python was going to inform the devel‐

opment of new programming languages and tools. These opening

paragraphs also beautifully encapsulate Python’s strengths in the

context of education.

Unfortunately the project was never finished due to a lack of fund‐

ing. I find it an interesting (and rather frustrating) “what if?”. How

might Python and computing education have developed if the

project had delivered on all three of the planned components?

In any case, this is yet more evidence of how Python has always had

education as a core focus. The proposal also appears prescient given

the recent changes in attitude to the computing curriculum and the

promotion of programming. Van Rossum was a decade and a half

too early. Could such a project be revived today?

Nevertheless, such educational endeavors did not go unnoticed.

Projects concerned with computing and education have successfully

made use of Python to great effect. For example, the 

One Laptop Per

Child (OLPC) project

 has the following aim: